1. Holism in biology 1.1 Reductionism, Mechanism, and Individualism 1.2 Vitalism 1.3 Emergentism 1.4 Examples: Physiology 1.5 Examples: Ecology 1.6 Examples: Evolutionary Biology 1.7 Examples: Genetics 1.8 Recurring Themes 2. Holism in physics 2.1 Holism in space–time theories 2.2 Holism in quantum physics 3. Holism in the social sciences 3.1 What is social holism? 3.2 Two types of social holis...

Epistemological holism is usually associated with linguistic holism, and sometimes the latter is inferred from the former. In this chapter I shall show how the view that the sense of a sentence be its immediate argumental role, though it conforms to the requirement of compositionality and hence involves a denial of linguistic holism, is perfectly compatible with epistemological holism. Thus, by...

1. Fears, worries and hopes Holism is a multifarious doctrine, which pertains to language, thought, action, confirmation or hypothesis testing, and the nature of reality. Meaning holism is also a multifarious doctrine, which pertains to expressions, sentences, kinds of sentences, languages, meanings, and possibly all the rest of the various things just mentioned. Meaning holism is intricate, "i...

This paper tries to give some substance to local holism, a picture that seems to fit Wittgenstein’s analysis of the working of language. In the first part I state the well-known paradox of semantic holism, as discussed in philosophy of language: if meaning is holistic there is no possibility to share any meaning. In the second part I present the different answers to this paradox, from atomism t...

1 MODERATE HOLISM AND THE INSTABILITY THESIS* Mental or semantic holism can be roughly characterized as the doctrine that the meanings of one’s sentence or the contents of one’s beliefs are a function of (are determined by) their relations to all of one’s other sentences and beliefs. Holistic theories of meaning and content are typically criticized for (among other things) leaving the ideas of ...

Whether or not meaning is compositional has been a major issue in linguistics and formal philosophy of language for the last two decades. Semantic holism is widely and plausibly considered as an objection to the principle of semantic compositionality therein. It comes as a surprise that the holistic peculiarities of scientific language have been rarely addressed in formal accounts so far, given...